PLATT, ENGLAND  We had just finished our hike through 10 miles of the Kent region's forest, glade and history. In the cold dusk of mid-December, a welcoming glow filtered through the thick panes of the Blue Anchor pub near the edge of this village.

It was still some distance to the train station in Borough Green. My estimable guide, Chris, and I hoped to catch a taxi in time for an early evening train back to London, 40 minutes to the northwest.

We knocked on the Blue Anchor's locked door. The proprietor, a friendly middle-aged chap named Alan, welcomed us. It was too early for him to open, but when we asked if we could summon a taxi and wait out front, he would not hear of it. Alan became our chance chauffeur, refusing payment with a pass of a hand. He left us with a cheery goodbye at the train station. He'd received the kindness of many strangers, he said - the world was full of them - and he only hoped we'd pass it forward.

Here it goes, Alan. Your gift went far beyond a 10-minute ride and a slosh of expensive British petrol. Alan reminded me why we Americans might learn a thing or two from the British in these unsettling times.

As in the states, English newspapers are checkered with stories about debt, unemployment, bank woes and the like. Two nights before, we had witnessed economics-dominated debates in the House of Lords and House of Commons from the public galleries in Parliament. In the grand stone fortress of the Palace of Westminster, built a thousand years ago for kings and knights, Labour and Conservative engaged in a thoroughly modern argument over the government's costly plans for new "eco-towns."

On our short ride to the train station, the conversation with Alan quickly moved to the economy. England has survived down times, he said; this, too, would pass. And so I was reminded again how history has placed worry and fear in distinct places in the British character. Their history proves that nothing is certain, not even the power of kings and queens, whose heads occasionally rolled through the long march of the British Empire. But civilization survives.

The stiff upper lip is permanently etched in the British character. One does not have to look that far back for evidence. The British government paid the last of its World War II "lend-lease" debts to the United States just this decade. Survival was at stake back in the 1940s, and it was important to repay the old friend that had stood, however reluctantly in the beginning, with them.

Today, the Imperial War Museum bears witness to the country's struggles through the darkest days of the 20th century, from the slaughter of a generation of young men in France's dank trenches in World War I, to Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and throughout World War II. Right now, the museum is seeking people that, as children, were evacuated from London and other cities to the countryside to escape the bombs of the German Luftwaffe. The boys and girls are senior citizens now. Curators were worried their stories of survival were being lost.

Foyle's War, a popular British television series earlier this decade, focused on the challenges of a small-town detective during World War II. It was set in Hastings, a seacoast town less than an hour away from Borough Green, and a recurring theme of the show was the rationing, hunger and deprivation on the home front.

But you don't need TV drama to touch this part of the British character. A World War II-era Victory Garden still grows down the street from Buckingham Palace. Nearby, Winston Churchill's war Cabinet rooms have been re-opened as a museum. This underground warren protected the irrepressible Churchill and key subordinates from the Luftwaffe's nightly visits. The incorrigible one, stogie in mouth and hat in the air, would emerge to walk over rubble and summon the spirit of a battered, but never defeated, people.

"Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be," Churchill told the House of Commons at the height of the Luftwaffe's blitz in 1940. "For without victory, there is no survival."

President-elect Barack Obama is said to be seeking inspiration in the history of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Churchill's optimism and defiance, his ability to rise above early-life disappointments to steel a nation in its most trying time, is not a bad model of leadership, either.

Not long ago, workers unsealed an intelligence room in Churchill's war Cabinet space that had not been disturbed since the war ended in 1945. One desk drawer contained an officer's wartime ration of three sugar cubes - in an envelope with his name on it. These simple cubes are prominently displayed. They look just as sweet as one imagines they would have been more than 60 years ago.

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